ABSTRACTS

Different aspects of bilingualism have been studied all over the world, (Grosjean
1982, Hornberger 1987, Romaine 1989, Zentella 1997, Wei 2000, King 2000, Ohara
2001, Pavlenko & Piller 2001, Piller 2002, Jaffe 2003). These studies have
looked at a wide range of topics in spoken language bilinguals such as patterns
of code switching, the role of code switching in community life, the success or
failure of bilingual education, second language learning and gender, as well as
many other issues focusing on single-modality bilinguals (using two spoken
languages). These studies are often not applicable to the study of bimodal
bilingualism in which the person knows a sign language from birth and the spoken
language of the larger, hearing society. The study of bilingualism in hearing
people from deaf families offers an opportunity to analyze how native users of
both a signed and a spoken language combine aspects of both languages
simultaneously (code blending). The lower status of American Sign Language (ASL)
in relation to English may also contribute to how these bimodal bilinguals view
and use their languages. Unlike spoken language bilinguals who must stop one
language before beginning another, a bimodal bilingual has the capability to
speak and sign at the same time. This linguistic capability will serve to inform
and expand the field of bilingualism as well as areas such as discourse analysis
and the role of code blending as a cultural identifier. This preliminary
research focuses on e-mails taken from a forum on the Internet for hearing
people with deaf parents. Two hundred and seventy five lines from 100 e-mails
were collected and analyzed. The study shows evidence of strong ASL grammatical
influence in these e-mails (an absence of overt subjects, overt objects,
determiners, copula, and prepositions) as well as unique structures (nonstandard
verb inflections, overgeneralization of ‘s’, syntactic calquing). There is also
a strong tendency to use English to “describe” an ASL sign (i.e., “My father
fork-in-throat”). The meaning of that sign fork-in-throat is “stuck,” but the
bilingual chooses to use the visual description of the sign instead of the
English lexical equivalent (note the absence of copula). The overall results of
this analysis are compared to Internet Relay Chat as described by Werry and
Mowbray (2001) and TDD writings (Mather 1991).

Parental Hearing Status and Signing among
Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students

On average, deaf and hard of hearing school-age children who have deaf or hard
of hearing parents differ from those who have hearing-only parents in their
signing experiences at home and school, as well as in their degree of hearing
loss. Findings reported here, based on analysis of data from the 2001-2002
Annual Survey of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children and Youth, indicate that
having at least one deaf parent is the most powerful indicator of the likelihood
that the student is in a home where signing is used regularly and in a classroom
where signing is a primary mode of communication used for instruction. Having
just one hard of hearing parent (and no deaf parent) greatly reduces the
likelihood that the child is receiving instruction in sign or regularly signs at
home. Parental hearing status is also associated with the child’s degree of
hearing loss, however, such that understanding the relationship between parental
hearing status and signing experiences must be tempered by the fact that the
physiological imperative for visual communication is frequently a result of
genetic inheritance.